CHAPTER XXV—THE WANDERING
At noon they set out through the mountains, the Marchesa Soderrelli riding the mule, the old man leading with the rope bridle over his arm, and the sack swinging on his shoulder. Caroline Childers walked beside the mountaineer. The Duke followed with the rifle. The world had changed; it was now a land of sun, of peace, of vast unending stillness. The carpet of the wilderness was dry; the dark-green tops of the fir trees brightened as with acid; the far-off stretch of forest, fresh, as though wiped with a cloth; the air like lotus.
The old man traveled along the backbone of the mountain, not as the crow flies, to the coast, but in the great arc of a circle swinging to the west. He thus avoided abrupt and perilous descents and the dense undergrowth of the hollows. The forest along these summits was open. Cyrus Childers had cleaned them of their fallen timber. They were now great groves of fir trees, shooting up their brown bodies into the sky, and stretching there a green, unending trellis through which the sunlight filtered.
The little party, traveling in these silent places, through this ancient wilderness, would have fitted into the morning of the world. The gigantic old man, the lank, huge mule, and the woman riding on the pack saddle might have come up in some patriarchal decade out of Asia. The girl, straight, slim, lithe and beautiful as a naiad, her cloudy black hair banked around her face, belonged in sacred groves—in ancient sequestered places—one of those alluring, mysterious, fairy women of which the fable in every tongue remains. Called by innumerable sounds in the mouths of men, but seen thus always in the eye of the mind when those sounds are uttered. The Marchesa Soderrelli was right, on that day in Oban, when she set youth first among the gifts of the gods. It is the beautiful physical mystery that allures the senses of men. And youth, be it said, is the essence of that sorcery.
The Duke of Dorset came, too, with fitness into the picture; he was the moving, desolate figure of that canvas. Man arriving at his estate in pride, in strength, in glory, and fallen there into the clutch of destiny. In his visible aspect he had recovered in a degree; he no longer bore the evidences of extreme fatigue, he walked with the rifle under his arm, and with a casual notice of events.
There is a certain provision of Nature wholly blessed. When one is called to follow that which is dearest to him, nailed up in a coffin, to the grave; when the bitterness of death has wracked the soul to the extreme of physical endurance; then, when under the turn of the screw blood no longer comes, there exudes, instead of it, a divine liquor that numbs the sensibilities like an anæsthetic, and one is able to walk behind the coffin in the road, to approach the grave, to watch the shovelful of earth thrown in, and to come away like other men, speaking of the sun, the harvest, the prospects of the to-morrow; it is not this day that is the deadliest; it is the day to follow—the months, the years to follow, when the broken soul has no longer an opiate.
The Duke of Dorset was in the door of life, in that golden age of it when the youth has hardened into the man, when the body has got its glory, and the mind its stature. And he moved here in this forest behind the others, a weapon in his hand, a figure belonging to the picture. He was the leader of the tribe, and its defense against its enemies; but a leader who had lost a kingdom, and whose followers had been put to the sword.